"Hey, look at me"

Results of a new survey conducted by San Diego State University found that:
Nearly 60 percent of college students polled by San Diego State University agreed their age group uses social networking sites for narcissistic, self-promoting and attention-seeking reasons, it was announced today.
The poll also found that two-thirds of the respondents agreed their generation is [...]

Read Full Post »

SubSonic 3.0

I’ve used SubSonic 2.x for a while and I’ve blogged about how useful it was as a tool to aid my development projects. A few weeks ago, SubSonic 3.0 was released and I hadn’t spent much time reviewing the updates and changes to version 3.0 until this week.
At the present, I have several large projects [...]

Read Full Post »

How to merge pages from a PDF document

A few months ago, I wrote a small article about extracting pages from a PDF document to create a new PDF document. This article will use the same library, iTextSharp, to merge pages from one PDF document to create a second PDF document.
For this utility, imagine having a PDF document with pages that are 8 [...]

Read Full Post »

Creating a FAST ESP entity blacklist

FAST ESP is a robust enterprise search platform that I’ve worked with and administer for a couple of internal projects. One of our requests for the FAST contractors was asking how we could fix the entity extraction algorithm to create a more accurate extraction.
The platform uses a complex method to determine and extract companies, persons, [...]

Read Full Post »

Using Microsoft WCF with Microsoft CRM 4

I experienced a problem with Microsoft CRM 4 that I hadn’t encountered in Microsoft CRM 3. When I upgraded my code from version 3 to version 4, I kept getting an error saying “Server was unable to process request.”
My first thought was that maybe I was doing something wrong. My code had worked fine [...]

Read Full Post »

How to write an application supporting plug-ins

In one of my current projects, I’m designing web services that may interact with various different third-party software. Right now, I’m just integrating one third-party API into the web services. In the future, there may be a few different third-party APIs integrated into the system.
I didn’t want to include all of the third-party libraries as [...]

Read Full Post »

Streaming video to your TV via your console

I read about the PlayOn Media Server on LifeHacker last week. It’s software that runs on your Windows computer and streams video to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The PlayOn Media Server streams content from YouTube, Netflix Instant Queue, Hulu, CBS, and ESPN.
The PlayOn Media Server demo works for 14 days and I’m almost half [...]

Read Full Post »

How to serialize SubSonic objects with nullable properties

Recently, I ran into the following error when trying to serialize some SubSonic generated classes.
Cannot serialize member ‘XXX’ of type System.Nullable`1[XXX]. XmlAttribute/XmlText cannot be used to encode complex types.

The SubSonic autogenerated classes cannot serialize nullable types such as DateTime? and GUID?. This is really a .NET serialization problem and not directly related to SubSonic, since [...]

Read Full Post »

FetchXML Builder for Microsoft CRM

Every now and then, I come across a developer utility that’s worth mentioning. The utility might not be new or even great, but its a tool that I’m able to put to use somewhere to solve a problem or just assist in the problem solving.
The FetchXML Builder by James Downey is a great tool because [...]

Read Full Post »

The Year 2038 Bug (January 19, 2038)

In about 29 years from today, you’ll be hearing a lot about the 2038 bug. This bug is similar to the Y2K bug, but this bug could actually affect computers more than the Y2K bug.
The Y2K (Year 2000) bug was due using two digits to manage the year value. For example, 99 represented 1999 and [...]

Read Full Post »